


Sleep

by Rhensis



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF), Video Blogging & YouTube RPF
Genre: Blood, Death, M/M, Murder, Night Terrors, Nightmares, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Pyschological, Sleep, Songfic, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 21:30:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1526474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhensis/pseuds/Rhensis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There are these terrors. And it's like, it feels like as if somebody was gripping my throat, like last night. They are not like tremors, they're worse than tremors, there are these terrors. Sometimes there are flames. And sometimes I see people that I love dying, and..." - Sleep, My Chemical Romance</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> this is my latest one shot, and also happens to be my 100th fic ayy

_“They’re terrors. Not nightmares,”_

_“Tell me what happens in them, Dan,”_

_“Screaming. That’s mostly… and flames. And the people that I love, dying right in front of me. And then there’s something – somebody – squeezing at my throat, and I look up and it’s…”_

_“It’s what, Dan? Remember, nothing you say leaves this room,”_

_“It’s… It’s my boy- my friend. Phil. And then I have a knife and I just-.”_

_“What do you do?”_

_“Hurt him. Stab him. Kill him. And then he’s dead in front of me and there’s nothing I can do. I hurt him,”_

-

“How was it?” Phil asks rather nonchalantly from his perch on the couch, and Dan doesn’t even pass him a glance as he walks past the living room door and into the kitchen.

He reaches up to the top cupboard for the coffee and dumps a few teaspoons of it into the mug that he left on the side before he went out. He knew that Phil wouldn’t tidy it up – he never tidies anything up.

Crashing sounds of something or another being knocked over, accompanied with a bout of somewhat mild cursing, tells him that Phil’s coming to pursue his question further, and Dan shakes his head a little. He presses the switch on the kettle and stares at it in silence, willing it to hurry up so that he can have his coffee without receiving the lecture.

The quiet sound of the kettle – which he has to say has always reminded him of one of those old women on TV with the rapid rasping breaths – is interrupted only by the sound of Phil’s heavy footsteps as they move from the carpet of the hall to the tiles of the kitchen.

Dan doesn’t look up at him. He keeps his palms pressed firmly on the edge of the counter, all his weight balanced on it, and his eyes stay on the coffee mug. It’s one that Phil bought him from an amusement park in America, and he flinches a little as he remembers all the smiles that that day contained.

“How was it?” Phil asks again, and Dan gives him a shrug of the shoulders. The kettle hisses at him and he reaches for it. He pours the water in without a word being spoken by either of them, and then quickly ambles towards the fridge.

“Dan,” Phil says quietly, and the younger boy looks up at him. His lips are set hard in a straight line, and he notices that Phil’s are pretty much the same, until he opens them to speak again. “If you don’t talk to me about it, I can’t help you,”

“You’ve already helped me, right?” Dan begins, tone scornful enough to sting his friend a little. “You told me that the best way to help me was to get me help. You got me help, even if it does absolutely nothing except force me to relive everything,”

“Talking about it helps, Dan. It gets it out into the open, and it means that you’re not just bottling it inside yourself like you always have done,”

“Oh, save your psychology bullshit for someone else, Phil,” Dan snaps as he pours the milk into his coffee carefully.

He stirs it with the teaspoon he used earlier, making fast movements so that he can get out of there as soon as possible. Once he’s satisfied he’ll be able to drink it without having to swallow a thousand lumps of coffee granules, he picks up the mug and moves to leave.

Phil’s standing in the doorway, blocking his path. He raises and eyebrow and tries to push past Phil’s arm, but the elder simply stares at him, a small frown set on his features.

“Fuck’s sakes, Phil. Let me go, I’m tired as fuck,” Dan says, and Phil knows that he’s not lying. It’s only just gone midday, but Phil knows without even asking that Dan probably didn’t even sleep for a full hour last night.

“Fine,” he concedes, moving his arm and letting his friend pass through. He watches Dan disappear down the corridor, and bites his lip gently.

-

_“How often do they happen?”_

_“Every night. I’m scared of…”_

_“Of what?”_

_“Going to sleep, I suppose. When I close my eyes I can see it all again. Even when I blink, there it is, flashing before me. I can’t even remember the last time I slept through a night,”_

_“Did the sleeping pills help at all?”_

_“No. They made it worse, actually. I slept for longer but the terror was worse. It was more vivid, and it felt like I was asleep for hours but really it was only one, and I was screaming so much that Phil-”_

_“Is this the Phil in your dreams?”_

_“He’s my flatmate,”_

_“Listen, Dan, I’m really sorry for asking, but I think this is important information. Has Phil ever been violent towards you?”_

-

It’s not unusual for him to wake up with his sheets smothered in his own sweat, or drenched with his own piss, or even worse, both. Still, every time he groans and his stomach falls, because more than anything else it’s embarrassing. Phil knows, of course. He couldn’t not know when they live in such close proximity, but frankly Dan doesn’t want his twenty-seven year old best friend/ex-boyfriend/flatmate knowing just how regularly his twenty-two year old friend wets the bed because of night terrors.

He sighs and pushes himself up out of his bed. Chewing on the bottom of his lip anxiously, Dan pads to the other side of the room and pulls his drawer open as quietly as possible. If he hasn’t already woken Phil up with possible screaming whilst he was still asleep, he doesn’t want to do it now. His friend will insist on helping with the sheets and that is the last thing that Dan wants; it was embarrassing enough the first time.

He takes off his boxers and shirt with a grimace, holding his breath so that he doesn’t have to deal with the stench, and then pulls on replacements for both of them. Before he pulls his shirt fully over his head, he stands there for just a moment, taking a deep breath of the fabric. It smells of the same detergent that Phil used when they first met, and it makes his stomach jolt to think of all the times Dan lay on top of Phil’s chest when they were living in Phil’s old flat, just listening to the elder’s steady heartbeat.

With a shudder, he pulls the shirt down. He bundles up the wet clothes and leaves them on the floor as the start of a washing pile. Soon his bed sheets and duvet cover join the pile, and he stands there staring at his almost bare bed for a moment, contemplating whether or not to take off his pillowcases. For good measure, he decides to do it just in case, and throws them on top of the pile.

He makes a small huffing sound as he scoops all the bedclothes up in his hands, nose crinkling up at the smell of them. In the back of his head, he wonders if he needs to go and buy a mattress cover for his bed, because at this rate he’s going to damage the mattress and that would be  _great_ to explain to Phil, who is convinced that this was a one time thing.

Shuffling down the hallway, Dan yawns as he makes his way to the washing machine. He’s so damn tired he can barely keep his eyes open, but he’d rather be this tired that have to face the terrors again.

Besides, the amount of time he’s had awake has been productive for his workload during the day. He gets all of his leisure time on the internet done during the night, and then works on his actual job during the day. His videos have been far more frequent than they used to be, although he had to go out and buy himself some make up (“for his girlfriend”, as he told the woman at the counter that was flirting playfully with him) to hide how pale his skin is and how deep the bags under his eyes are.

He keeps wearing baggy shirts so that they can’t see how thin he is, either. Getting no sleep and then eating nothing out of feeling sick from the nightmares means that even that little bit of pudge that he always had, no matter what he did, has all but gone now, leaving him able to poke at his ribs. If he’s honest, he thought that it would make him look better at first, but now he just looks like a corpse. His own reflection scares him a little.

He dumps the sheets in the machine with another yawn. His jaw clicks, and the sound resonates through the long hallway, which is somewhat more eerie in the night time than it is during the day.

With a press of the button, the machine kicks itself into action just as a small voice rings out and mixes with the loud growling sounds of it.

“Dan?”

Dan mumbles a curse under his breath and turns around to see Phil, wearing nothing but his pyjama bottoms and glasses.

“Sorry, did I wake you up?” Dan asks quietly, fumbling with the bottom of his shirt and letting his eyes fall to the floor.

“No, I wasn’t really sleeping anyway. I was thinking about things. Are you okay? Did you have another… you know,”

It’s a stupid question, but Dan can’t blame Phil for asking it. His friend probably still lives in hope that someday they will stop, that some time in the future Dan will be able to put his head to the pillow without seeing the same images over and over again.

“Yeah. Don’t worry about it, it wasn’t as bad as usual,” that’s a lie, of course, but it makes the corners of Phil’s lips prick up.

“Really? Does that mean that the treatment could be helping?” He asks hopefully, his words gliding off his tongue effortlessly in a manner that Dan hasn’t heard in a while. It’s been a long time since either of them has been able to speak completely freely.

“Maybe. We’ll have to see,” Dan says with a shrug, but Phil bounds towards him, scooping him up in his arms.

Dan used to be shorter than him, and he wishes that he still was. That way, perhaps Phil would be able to wrap his arms around him and put his chin on the top of his head and protect him from the whole world, including the one in his dreams.

Then again, Phil wouldn’t possibly want to do that. No, he pulls away as quickly as he started the hug and shuffles his feet around awkwardly, and that’s all the proof Dan needs to know that Phil doesn’t really want Dan in his arms. Still, Dan wonders when it became awkward for his own best friend to give him a simple hug.

-

_“Does your flatmate know that you’re coming here?”_

_“He’s the one who made me come in the first place,”_

_“You said he’s never been violent towards you, but has the nature of your relationship always been healthy? Or has… anything else ever happened between you?”_

_“Why does it matter?”_

_“I’m just curious. And it might reveal something,”_

_“Fine. We used to be together. He broke it off about a year ago. It was my fault; he never laid a finger on me or did anything to hurt me. That was always me, not him,”_

_“What did you do to hurt him, Dan? Were you violent towards him?”_

_“Not really. I mean, I raised a fist at him a couple of times, but I always punched the wall, not him. I could never actually hurt him; I just have a bad temper sometimes. That wasn’t why we broke up, anyway,”_

-

He hates being alone at night, especially on those nights when he can’t sleep at all. Every time he closes his eyes (which is a lot, considering how tired he is and how much his body is trying to convince his mind that he has to go to sleep), he sees everything, and without someone here to be with him, it’s much harder convincing himself that those images aren’t real.

The television speakers crackle a little as he fiddles with the cables at the back and accidentally knocks the one for the sound. He fumbles around clumsily, trying to figure out why there’s no picture on the TV coming from the DVD player, and mutters to himself as he pulls out random cables and rearranges them, trying to figure out what the hell is wrong.

When he notices that the extension pack they use for the electronics isn’t actually turned on, he curses loudly at an empty room with annoyance.

Once he finally has it working, he settles back on the sofa with his duvet and tub of ice cream, prepared to just sit here and eat until Phil gets back. If there’s one thing that Dan’s stomach never rejects it’s  _Ben and Jerry’s_ , which is probably why Phil’s started buying a lot more of it than he used to.

Phil looks after him a lot better than Dan gives him credit for. Despite Dan being an absolute dickhead to him, Phil still makes sure that Dan doesn’t want for anything, even if that means he spends a lot of his own money on Dan, who technically earns a lot more. If Dan ever asks for anything, Phil gives it to him.

Which is partly why Dan tends to avoid him nowadays. If he does that, it means that Phil can’t fuss over him, or ask him what he needs. Dan doesn’t want Phil spending money on him, if he’s honest. He really should be looking after himself.

It’s hard, though. It’s hard when he can barely stay awake because he can’t sleep, and it’s hard when his entire life is mixed with Phil’s. Dan’s friends are Phil’s friends. Dan’s apartment is also Phil’s apartment. Dan’s clothes are often actually Phil’s clothes. Dan’s job is Phil’s job.

He pulls the lid off the ice cream tub and reaches for the spoon that was balanced on the arm of the couch. With the widest grin he can muster (which is barely a small smile), he tucks in and sits back a little more, watching the movie on the screen. It’s a movie that he never watches when Phil is home because it creeps the elder out a little, but it is definitely one of Dan’s favourites.

He’s about halfway into the movie, and the old woman is trying to offer the main characters cakes that Dan definitely thinks are full of all kinds of drugs, when he hears the bang of the front door. Assuming that it’s Phil, he doesn’t bother to move, and just waits for the elder to come in if he wants to.

Really, Dan should have gone out with him, but he wasn’t up to it. They were meant to be going out with friends that they haven’t seen in a while – mostly YouTuber friends, so it’s not like they never speak to them, but it’s not the same as being face-to-face – and the dinner had been organised months ago, so Dan felt more than a little guilty when he found himself telling Phil that he really couldn’t go. They’d notice how tired he was from how grotesque his face looks – and if he wore make up they’d notice that and tease him about it – and he probably wouldn’t manage to stay awake for very long, he reasoned. Besides, if he accidentally fell asleep, he’d have a nightmare, and then they’d all ask all kinds of questions.

No one knows apart from him, Phil and his therapist. She’s an odd woman, which is probably the only reason why Dan’s managed to say anything to her. She’s slightly round, her face resembling the shape of a plum tomato. Her hair is cut right where her shoulders begin, and Dan can tell that she’s tried to use hair dye to hide where it’s greying. She always wears these oddly coloured suit jackets over puce blouses, accompanied with short skirts and flesh-coloured tights that are too dark for her own skin tone. She doesn’t try to intimidate him, like every other therapist he’s ever had did, and the accent of her words is familiar enough to Phil’s old northern one to make a small part of him trust her.

A few minutes pass and Phil doesn’t come into the sitting room. Dan finds that odd, and his lips fall into a small frown. Carefully, he puts the lid back on his ice cream (which is almost finished), and stands up. He knee clicks, and the sound sounds far too loud in his dark apartment.

He slips down the hallway and into the kitchen. He pulls out a knife from the drawer, watching as it gleams a little in the street light coming in through the window. As he walks back out, he hears the footsteps from down the hall, and a small whimper escapes his mouth.

Desperately, he tries to convince himself that he’s hallucinating, that it’s the lack of sleep (it wouldn’t be the first time this has happened due to sleep deprivation), but something about this feels so chillingly real that his heart is thudding in his ears and his throat has gone dry.

“Is there anybody there?” He asks, voice so hoarse that he barely hears it himself. As soon as the words fall from his lips he internally chastises himself, because who the hell calls out to the crazed murderer in their house?

It could still be Phil. Of course it could be. But then again, Phil knows how tired Dan is. He wouldn’t jerk him around like this.

Something falls over, and Dan sees the darkness shifting. He grips the knife hilt harder.

The force that barrels into him knocks him over and he yelps loudly. The breath on his face from the person above him stinks of alcohol, and he knows that this isn’t Phil. Phil’s hands only reach around his throat in his dreams; this isn’t Phil.

“Get off me!” Dan shrieks, and he pushes the person away, putting up a feeble fight. He’s so damn tired he just doesn’t have the strength-

The person’s fingers tighten more around his throat. He reaches for the knife that he’d dropped when he fell down, and finds the blade end.

Before he even thinks, he takes the handle in his hand and thrusts it upwards as hard as he can.

A small whimper leaves the person’s mouth, and their hands fall from Dan’s neck. Dan pushes them off with a squeal, and looks down at his hands.

“Oh, God,” he murmurs, staring at his hands. They’re covered in blood, blood from the wound of his attacker. He looks down at them and looks right at their eyes, which are open, the pupils blown to full size.

She’s younger than him, and her hair is the same shade as Phil’s when it’s dyed. How she had the strength to tackle him down, let alone choke him, is beyond him.

He fumbles and leans down, pressing his ear to her chest. He can’t hear anything, and he cries out.

His phone is in his pocket and he scrambles for it, smearing his jeans and t-shirts with blood. Her blood. That he drew.

He somehow manages to get his phone out, not even thinking about the blood that he’s going to get all over it. He dials the number with his shaking hands and presses it to his ear, tears of hysteria starting to fall down his cheeks.

“Dan? What’s up, are you okay?”

“Phil, I need you to come home and I need you to come home now. I- Someone broke in and I tried to fight them off and they’re not breathing and I don’t know what the fuck to do,”

“Have you called 999?”

“Fuck, no, I don’t- Phil please, please come fucking home I need you I can’t even think,”

“Okay, I’m coming. Don’t go off the phone. Guys, I have to go home and see Dan, I’m sorry. I’ll ring you later,” Dan hears Phil’s frantic voice as he speaks to his friends, and he has no idea what the hell they’re going to think about this.

“Are you still with me?” Phil asks, and Dan nods before remembering that Phil isn’t there.

“Yeah. Phil I- I think I’ve killed her,”

-

_“What happened, Dan?”_

_“It was an accident. I promise. The police believed me. They said that she was some crazy obsessed fan, but she was drunk and it all kind of went wrong. They don’t think she meant any harm but… What was I meant to do?”_

_“It was self-defence,”_

_“Yeah, but it was…”_

_“It was what, Dan?”_

_“It was so like my dream. She had her hands around her throat and I stabbed her in the same place that I always stab in my nightmare. She even_ looked  _like him. Her eyes were blue and her hair was black,”_

_“It’s just a coincidence, okay? You need to understand that. Unfortunately, the world is not a safe place, and these kinds of things happen. There’s nothing you could have done to prevent it,”_

_“No, but if I killed her, I could hurt Phil. It’s not safe for me to be anywhere near him, but he won’t leave me alone. He’s been refusing to leave me alone ever since it happened,”_

_“He’s just trying to keep you safe,”_

_“He won’t even let me sleep alone,”_

_“Does that make you uncomfortable because you used to date?”_

_“Why the hell are you so strung up on the fact that we used to date?”_

_-_

He wakes up screaming. Phil bolts up immediately from where he had been half asleep in the chair that he’d propped up next to Dan’s bed, and he reaches over for his friend.

He doesn’t stop yelling until Phil’s arms are around him and he’s being rocked back and forth by the elder. Once he’s stopped, he just bursts into tears instead, head falling onto Phil’s shoulder.

“Wh-Why is this happening to me?” He splutters, and Phil rubs Dan’s back gently, making soft hushing sounds.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,”

“It’s not fair. I can’t do it anymore, Phil. I can’t,”

-

_“How often do you think things like that, Dan? About dying, I mean.”_

_“Probably more than I should. I don’t know. I can’t leave Phil, though, even if I really wanted to…”_

_“Dan… I’m really sorry, I know you don’t want to tell me, but I think it’s important for me to know. You obviously care about Phil an awful lot. What did you do that meant he broke up with you?”_

_“Lots of things, I guess. I was a shit boyfriend. I was dependant, clingy, annoying. And then after an argument I…”_

_“What did you do?”_

_“I cheated. With one of our best friends,”_

-

“I can’t live in this house anymore,” Phil whispers quietly, and Dan’s neck whips round so that he’s facing him.

The elder has his hands clutched around a bowl of cereal, and his glasses are further down on the bridge of his nose than usual. He’s staring at Dan a little sheepishly, eyes flicking to and from his face.

“What? Because of me?”

“No! No, that’s not what I meant. I want to live with  _you_ , but I can’t live in this apartment specifically. It’s… There are too many memories here,”

“What? Like memories of when I killed a woman in our fucking hallway, or when you decided to break up with me?” Dan spits, words coming out harsher than he means them too. He has a splitting headache from crying all night on his own, as Phil finally moved back to his own room, and he’s always just so damn  _tired_.

“Why the hell are you yelling at me?” Phil says evenly, face scrunching up a little.

“I don’t want to move, Phil. I like it here. This is home, in case you’d forgotten. We said this would be home until we needed somewhere bigger,”

“Yeah, well we didn’t know that you would go and fuck Chris and then have fucking stupid nightmares every night,”

“Oh yeah, because I really like having night terrors, don’t I, Phil? I do it just to inconvenience you, don’t I?” Dan snaps, and he sees Phil’s fists clench around his spoon.

“Maybe not, but you certainly didn’t fuck up our entire relationship by accident, Dan,” Phil shouts, and Dan stops with his mouth half-open to spew out another come back.

Instead, he shakes his head and pushes himself up off the sofa, leaving behind his Macbook and the new phone that Phil bought for him after they realised the blood was never going to come off.

“Where are you going?”

“Not to fuck Chris again, in case you’re worried! I’m going for a walk,”

“Dan, you can barely stay awake, what if you fall asleep and fall into a road?”

“Then I’ll be fucking dead! Not like you care, not like anyone cares,”

“How the hell can you say that? Dan?” Phil screams after him, but Dan’s already running down the stairs and out the door.

Phil knows that if Dan doesn’t want to be found, he never will be, and he kicks the wall as Dan slams the front door shut.

-

_“We weren’t scheduled an appointment today, Dan. Why did you come here?”_

_“Me and Phil argued. I didn’t know where else to go. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come,”_

_“No, don’t get up. Sit back down, please. I don’t have any patients for the next couple of hours, it’s okay. Do you want to talk about it?”_

_“He wants to move. I can’t move,”_

_“A move might be beneficial. The memories associated with your house might be triggering the night terrors,”_

_“I don’t think so. Truthfully, I think I’ve always known why I get them. I just keep trying to fight it, to ignore it,”_

_“If you think you know, then why don’t you tell me?”_

_“Because I don’t want to say it. I’m scaring myself,”_

_“Dan?”_

_“I hurt Phil all the time. I do it emotionally, even if I’ve never done it physically. I’m terrified of myself. I could hurt him. I would hurt him. I’ve always sworn blind that I wouldn’t but I would. And I don’t mean emotionally because I don’t seem to ever have had any qualms about that, but physically? I think I’m capable of it. I almost did it today. I left to stop myself,”_

_“Are you saying that you’d want to hurt Phil?”_

_“I think- Maybe,”_

-

Dan wipes the tears off his face as he starts to walk back down the street. He stuffs his shaking hands in his pockets and sniffs quietly, trying to keep his eyes open. He’s so tired, so drained, and he almost-

The car beeping at him startles him enough to jump out of the way. He trips over the edge of the pavement and falls onto the street before breaking out into sobs right there and then. Someone stops and offers him a hand, but he ignores it and curls up a little, not giving a shit about the spectacle he’s making of himself.

He’s on the floor, bawling his eyes out, and anyone could see him. Fans could be on him in any second, trying to take pictures and tweet the latest about Dan Howell having a public breakdown in the street.

Somehow, he pulls himself over to the side and leans against the wall, ignoring the frantic whispers of the people around him. Some of them want to know if he needs an ambulance, others are muttering about how there are so many nutters out there the streets aren’t safe anymore.

They’re right. Dan is a nutter. He’s dangerous, and he’s barely awake, and he needs Phil.

He pulls out his phone and his finger stops just before he hits Phil’s number. Phil doesn’t want him. Why would he? Dan’s a cheat and a murderer and he’s so, so fucked up. Phil  _shouldn’t_ want him. Phil deserves better.

He looks up and sees the people around him dispersing, and through the thinning crowd he just about makes out. But-

Why would he be here?

He’s unmistakable though. It’s Phil walking towards him, and it’s Phil that’s about to-

“No!”

-

_“Do you want to talk about it, Dan?”_

_“Nothing to talk about. Everything is very much the same.”_

_“You… You watched your best friend get run over. He stepped out in front of a car because he was trying to find you. Nothing is the same.”_

_“You’re talking like he’s dead when he’s not. But I’m still having nightmares. I still can’t sleep.”_

_“Have the nightmares changed?”_

_“No. I dream about killing him at night, and during the day I can’t get the image out of my head of him in my arms. His blood was on my hands. Sometimes I look down at my hands and can still feel how soft his hair was beneath my fingers as I ran them through the strands before the ambulance got there.”_

_“How’s he doing, by the way? I meant to ask,”_

_“He’s fine. He’s moved in with another friend for a while,”_

_“And how do you feel about that?”_

_“I don’t know. How am I meant to feel, knowing that I ruined any chance of fixing things? Knowing that he probably won’t want to see me again, or at least not for a long time. I haven’t seen him since he left the hospital and he hasn’t called me,”_

_“This is probably hard for him. He’ll come round, given time. You just have to help him.”_

_“I don’t want to. I’ve already gotten him hurt once. I can’t do it again.”_

_“Don’t blame yourself. Guilt over this is not to be on your shoulders,”_

_“I don’t blame myself. That’s the worst bit.  I don’t even really feel guilty,”_

-

He closes his eyes.

The images don’t flash by his eyes, and a small smile passes across his face. He feels peaceful, for the first time in months. The line is still open, his phone is on speaker, and he can hear Phil talking to him happily, just having a normal conversation. He doesn’t say anything, because he just wants to hear Phil’s tales. He’s retelling all his latest adventures with Pj, and Dan’s stomach is warm with that blissful feeling he’s so used to.

He doesn’t feel bad for doing this to Phil anymore. Phil will be okay. And so will he, once he’s asleep.

And now, he can sleep, and he can’t ever wake up.

-

_“Tell me, Phil. Why are you here?”_

_“Nightmares. The worst nightmares,”_

_“Tell me what happens in them, Phil,”_

_“Screaming. His screaming, and the sounds of him choking. I could hear it all. It replays at night. I don’t know how much longer I can take it. I hurt him. It’s my fault. He got what he wanted, he wanted to sleep. But now…”_

_“This isn’t your fault. This guilt is not yours,”_

_“I left him alone. I didn’t realise how much he was falling apart after I got hit,”_

_“No one did. I didn’t even see it,”_

_“We should have done. Maybe if we had, he’d still be awake.”_


End file.
